abstract: Do fact-checks influence individuals' attitudes and evaluations of political candidates and campaign messages? This dissertation examines the influence of fact-checks on citizens' evaluations of political candidates. Using an original content analysis, I determine who conducts fact-checks of candidates for political office, who is being fact-checked, and how fact-checkers rate political candidates' level of truthfulness. Additionally, I employ three experiments to evaluate the impact of fact-checks source and message cues on voters' evaluations of candidates for political office. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Political Science 2015

This research examines the central question of representation in the California State Legislature and the United States House of Representatives. This thesis examines the proper size for both legislative bodies in comparison to their current sizes. Considering this analysis, this thesis proposes that the California State Legislature be doubled in size, and that the United States House of Representatives be increased in size in accordance with the Wyoming Rule. This thesis examines the advantages and drawbacks of a larger legislature in both settings. Increasing the size of the California State Legislature would lower campaign costs, improve representation for communities of interest, and reduce the effectiveness of partisan gerrymandering. Increasing the size of the U.S. House of Representatives would reduce malapportionment among states, make the Electoral College more equitable, and increase political diversity among the states.

Esta dissertação estuda a corrupção política e o Caixa 2 de campanhas eleitorais no Brasil, avaliando o seu impacto na qualidade da democracia, em especial na responsividade dos governos às preferências da maioria dos cidadãos. Com base em observações descritivas a partir de depoimentos, notícias de jornal e dados de pesquisa, busca-se investigar como os fenômenos estudados afetam o funcionamento do accountability vertical e distorcem a competição eleitoral. / This dissertation studies political corruption and slush funds in electoral campaigns in Brazil, assessing their impact in the quality of democracy, specially on the responsiveness of governments to the preferences of the majority of the citizens. Based on descriptive observations from public statements, newspaper articles and existing research data, an attempt is made to investigate how these phenomena affect the proper functioning of vertical accountability and distort electoral competition.

This diploma thesis examines one of the new trends of contemporary marketing, the so-called guerilla marketing. The theoretical part is devoted to the origin of guerilla marketing, its principles, advantages and disadvantages. Furthermore, I present different types of guerilla marketing and methods of their use. In the practical part, I discuss specific guerrilla campaigns and try to prove the nature of guerilla marketing where ideas can defeat the budget. The last part is devoted to questionnaire survey to determine the awareness of the Czech public about guerilla marketing and analyzed campaigns.

Criminal violence is one of the top policy concerns among citizens throughout many Latin American countries. Existing research would predict that political parties will exploit the issue in their campaigns to win electoral support. And yet, there are elections in which the issue of criminal violence is downplayed, even in countries with high levels of violence. Why are parties avoiding the issue of crime in contexts with high crime levels? Are parties leaving votes on the table by avoiding the issue or are they working within constraints that have not yet been fully theorized? In this dissertation, I provide some answers to these questions. The overarching argument is that when criminal violence is seen as intractable, the issue becomes a liability for political parties in their campaigns. The persistence of criminal violence gives citizens opportunities to learn about the ability of parties to manage crime and about the effectiveness of anti-crime policies at reducing crime. Empirically, I focus on the case of Mexico. If parties are indeed constrained in their campaign messaging by a loss of credibility over the issue, then we should observe parties downplaying crime related ads in their campaigns, especially in areas with chronic crime. In the first paper, I use an original data-set that I built by using web-scraping tools to download all the radio and TV ads from the archive of Mexico's National Electoral Institute and by applying natural language processing techniques to classify the campaign ads by topic, particularly by whether they emphasize crime related issues or not. The data set includes the texts of over 30,000 campaign ads played by parties in elections during the period under study. I find that from 2012 to 2018, political parties play crime related ads fewer times in states where homicides have remained high or have been increasing. The second paper uses the data on campaign ads as its main independent variable to identify the effects of crime related campaign ads on the vote shares of party coalitions. In this paper, I argue that in contexts of persistent crime, campaigning on crime will be a liability for parties that have been in office and have not been able to deliver improvements in public safety. Incumbent parties that have staked their reputations on fighting crime will be especially vulnerable to these effects. Over time, if criminal violence remains unresolved, voters will discount electoral promises to address the issue, potentially moving on to other issues. I test this argument using a research design that exploits differential radio and TV coverage at the electoral precinct level. I find that as chronic crime increases, increases in crime related campaign ads decrease the vote share of the PAN in 2012 but increase that of the PRI and AMLO. In 2018, however, these effects are weakened. Finally, the third paper uses a survey experiment that tests to what extent anti-crime policies help politicians cultivate a favorable image by transmitting desirable characteristics like effectiveness. In the experiment, repressive anti-crime policies increase perceptions of a politician’s effectiveness but only insofar as respondents think that military interventions reduce violence and that criminal groups are to blame for it. Against the conventional wisdom in the literature, I find that preventative policies also increase perceptions of politician effectiveness and the effect remains even among those who blame the government and where local homicide rates are increasing. Together, the three papers highlight the importance of considering the histories of criminal violence when studying the effects of crime on politics.

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The growing evidence of harm caused by pornography calls for interventions to counteract the influence of explicit sexual media. Fireproof Ministries conducts a major Christian anti-pornography campaign called XXXchurch. This case analysis of the campaign evaluated if the messages were appropriately designed in light of what persuasion research has discovered about motivating attitudinal and behavioral change. Theories about agenda setting, attitude accessibility, exemplars, evidence, cognitive dissonance, guilt, reactance, fear appeals, and self-efficacy were the basis of identifying the themes of the campaign, evaluating the credibility of XXXchurch, and assessing the theoretical foundation of the campaign. The study found three dominant objectives of the campaign: awareness, prevention, and recovery. XXXchurch has set the pornography agenda in many Christian churches, and also brings the issue to a wider public through news media; they have been featured in thousands of media publications and broadcasts. XXXchurch measures their own success by the stories and feedback they hear from their audience, the media attention they receive, and their increased acceptance by churches. The three main groups of themes in the messages of the campaign are prevention and recovery, the harm of pornography, and how God's purposes for life are impacted by pornography. These themes are essentially persuasive messages encouraging people to consider the negative consequence of using pornography and the benefits of resisting it. The attitudes influenced through these messages are the precursors to taking action to overcome pornography. The XXXchurch campaign establishes credibility with their audience through six elements: (a) prior experience or perceptions, (b) credentials, competence, and expertise (c) honesty and lack of bias, (d) similarity to the audience, (e) bold, confident delivery, and (f) plausible messages. Examples of self-efficacy, exemplars, and fear appeals were the most frequently found theories in the campaign messages. Persuasion theories functioned as useful tools for analyzing and understanding the campaign. Although the XXXchurch team did not design the campaign with these theories in mind, the theories strongly explain the foundation of the campaign. Taken as a whole, the campaign clearly demonstrates research-based principles, which suggest a prediction of successfully influencing attitudes and behavior.

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Social media platforms have become immensely popular over the years, leading to significant changes in cyberspace and the emergence of numerous challenges. These challenges have various faces, such as disinformation, online hate, cyberbullying, discrimination, biases, and other facets of harm. From the perspective of an end-user, the modern-age online ecosystem can be harmful in various ways, e.g., by consistently coming across disinformation in the online spaces or being targeted by a hate attack because of a specific ethnic or racial background. As we move forward, it is crucial to understand the nature and impact of new-age harms to make the Internet a safer place for everyone. To this end, my first contribution is the study of inauthentic accounts, also known as troll accounts. Troll accounts on social media are often sponsored by state actors aiming to manipulate public opinion on sensitive political topics. The strategy they commonly use is to interact with one another and appear innocuous to a regular user while covertly being used to spread toxic content and/or disinformation. I first study the effect that troll accounts have on online discussions on Reddit and show that state-sponsored troll accounts on Reddit produce threads that attract more toxic comments than other posts on the same subreddit. Next, I build TROLLMAGNIFIER, a detection system for troll accounts based on the observation that these accounts often exhibit loose coordination and interact with each other to advance specific narratives. TROLLMAGNIFIER learns the typical behavior of known troll accounts and identifies more that behave similarly. I show that using TROLLMAGNIFIER, one can grow the initial knowledge of potential trolls provided by Reddit by over 300%. Building upon the understanding of troll accounts and online campaigns, I then study the broader aspects of online disinformation. In this work, I study 19 influence campaigns on Twitter originating from various countries and identify several strategies adopted across different state actors, e.g., using scheduling services to delegate their posting tasks, utilizing fake third-party versions of popular applications (e.g., “Twitter for Android”) to post messages, extensively retweeting to push certain agendas, and posting innocuous messages (e.g., motivational quotes) to potentially avoid detection. Overall, I identify several universal traits among campaigns to create a cross-campaign detection system that can detect upto 94% accounts from unseen campaigns. Lastly, I delve deeper into the importance of cybersafety and study coordinated attacks, such as cyber-aggression and hate attacks, which are becoming increasingly common on video sharing networks like YouTube. Polarized online communities choose targets on prominent online platforms (e.g., YouTube) and organize their attacks by sending hateful messages to their target. The proposed system, TUBERAIDER, addresses this issue by automating the detection and attribution of attacks to their source communities, aiding in moderation, and understanding the motivations behind such actions. The system collects YouTube video links from diverse sources, including 4chan’s /pol/ board, r/The_Donald subreddit, and 16 incel subreddits. The attribution is performed through a machine learning classifier based on TF-IDF scores of important keywords and achieves an accuracy above 75% in attributing a coordinated attack to a given video. In summary, my research focuses on understanding, detecting, and combating online harms using a data-driven approach. I develop tools to mitigate the malicious behavior with the goal of offering policymakers guidelines to ensure user safety on social media platforms.